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The New Yorker staff writer Jon Lee Anderson joins Tyler Foggatt to talk about the Trump Administration’s military strikes on alleged Venezuelan drug boats in the Caribbean. They discuss the questionable intelligence and rationale behind the operation, the legal concerns raised by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s alleged order to leave no survivors in a September strike, and whether the attacks feels more performative than strategic. They also explore how Trump’s framing of the issue as a drug war intersects with his broader ambitions—from pressuring the Venezuelan President, Nicolás Maduro, to reasserting American dominance in the hemisphere—and how other Latin American countries may respond to further military action in the region.

This week’s reading:

“Can Trump’s Peace Initiative Stop the Congo’s Thirty-Year War?,” by Jon Lee Anderson

“The Dishonorable Strikes on Venezuelan Boats,” by Ruth Marcus

“The Legal Consequences of Pete Hegseth’s ‘Kill Them All’ Order,” by Isaac Chotiner

“The Undermining of the C.D.C.,” by Dhruv Khullar

“In the Line of Fire,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

“Three times a week I give myself over to probing the depths with my psychiatrist,” a twenty-seven-year-old not-yet-famous Samuel Beckett wrote in a letter to his cousin Morris Sinclair, on January 27, 1934. Beckett had moved to London from his family home, in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock, a few weeks earlier in order to begin analysis. “I regard myself as very fortunate to have been able to embark on it,” he continued. “It is the only thing that interests me at the moment, and that is how it should be, for these sorts of things require one to attend to them to the exclusion of virtually anything else.”

Anyone familiar with the iconic image of Beckett in a black turtleneck staring impenetrably at the camera might find it difficult to imagine him consumed by “the analysis,” as he called it. After all, this was a writer so private that, after being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1969, he told the reporters who’d managed to locate him in the coastal Tunisian village of Nabeul that he would grant them a few minutes for photographs only if he could remain silent. (You can watch the bizarre result with a Swedish television crew on YouTube.) But after his beloved father died, in 1933, he “had trouble psychologically,” as he put it in a 1989 interview collected in James and Elizabeth Knowlson’s “Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett.” Beckett’s symptoms included, among other things, severe anxiety, depression, boils, constipation, and heart palpitations, as well as night terrors that quieted only when his brother, Frank, slept in bed with him.

Most of Beckett’s letters about his analysis are addressed to his friend Thomas McGreevy, whom he met in Paris, where he had a lectureship at the École Normale Supérieure between 1928 and 1930. After McGreevy introduced Beckett to James Joyce, Beckett began unofficially assisting him—running errands, taking dictation on what would eventually become “Finnegans Wake,” following him around. Beckett, aside from developing foot pain after wearing pointed-toe leather shoes identical to Joyce’s, despite having larger feet, thrived in Paris. He published an essay on Joyce’s work, a critical volume on Proust, a short story, and “Whoroscope,” a pamphlet-long dramatic monologue from the perspective of a bawdy René Descartes who spews Joycean puns (“prostisciutto”) while waiting for an egg to ripen. (At McGreevy’s suggestion, Beckett dashed off the poem on the final day of a contest hosted by Hours Press, slipping it into the publisher Nancy Cunard’s box sometime after 3 A.M. to become the surprise winner.)

In 1930, Beckett returned to Ireland for a lectureship at Trinity College. Suddenly, he had no writing community: “Whoroscope,” considered risqué in Ireland, was not carried in bookstores, reviewed, or even read. Before long, Beckett confided to his friend in a letter, he was unable to “imagine even the shape of a sentence, nor take notes . . . nor read with understanding.” The biographer Deirdre Bair, drawing on these letters before they were published, was the first to detail his analysis, and the suffering that led him there. In her 1978 biography, she notes that the writer became depressed and dishevelled, wearing stained clothing and a tattered raincoat with “a pocket permanently distended by the bottle of stout he carried in it.” After spending days in bed facing the wall in a fetal position, Bair writes, Beckett resigned from his lectureship and was back in Paris by early 1932 to try to pick up where he’d left off.

But Paris redux was not all he’d hoped. Joyce had become distant after Beckett refused the advances of his daughter, Lucia. Still, Beckett managed to write his first novel, “Dream of Fair to Middling Women,” which was narrated by a fictional Mr. Beckett who follows the protagonist—a “barely fictionalized Beckett,” Bair observes—from childhood through university and early adulthood. That May, the President of France, Paul Doumer, was assassinated by a Russian national, and it became difficult for foreigners to remain in Paris. Beckett moved to London, hoping to find a publisher. Instead, he quickly ran out of money and had to “crawl home,” as he later told Knowlson. (The novel wouldn’t come out until 1992, three years after Beckett’s death, and four decades after he’d been catapulted to international fame by his landmark 1953 play, “Waiting for Godot.”)

This marked the start of what Beckett would later call the “bad years,” when his symptoms began to spin out of control. At the center of his misery stood his mother, who nagged him to get a job. Middle-class, non-intellectual, invested in the social world, May Beckett limited her financial support for her son, hoping to squeeze him into compliance through what he described as her “savage loving.” Beckett buoyed himself with his father’s warm attention. “Lovely walk this morning with Father, who grows old with a very graceful philosophy,” he wrote to McGreevy. “I’ll never have any one like him.” But after his father died of a heart attack, Beckett’s ailments became extreme. “I’ll tell you how it was,” he said to Knowlson years later. “I was walking up Dawson Street and I felt I couldn’t go on. It was a strange experience I can’t really describe. . . . So I went into the nearest pub and got a drink—just to stay still. And I felt I needed help.”

To get that help, Beckett turned to his friend Geoffrey Thompson, a physician training to become a psychoanalyst, who recommended psychoanalysis. Beckett’s mother agreed to pay for the treatment after Frank told her that he couldn’t run his late father’s business and continue to comfort his brother at night. In early 1934, Beckett returned to London and began seeing Wilfred R. Bion, a psychiatrist just out of medical school who was training at the Tavistock Clinic. They would meet three times a week for the next two years.

Most of what we know about Beckett’s time in analysis is pieced together from a few sources: Beckett’s letters, some interviews, and several accounts by people who knew him, many of which are included in “Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett.” The Tavistock suffered from the bombing of London during the Second World War, and so any notes that Bion might have kept there were likely destroyed. Beckett, for his part, did chronicle the sessions. “I used to go back to my digs and write notes on what had happened, on what I’d come up with,” he told Knowlson. “I’ve never found them since but maybe they still exist somewhere.” If they do, no one else has found them either. This has kept his treatment from entering the Analyses of Great Writers genre, exemplified most recently by Joan Didion’s “Notes to John.”

Ye­­t even without the gossipy pleasure of being let into Beckett’s personal life, what is available of the analysis is exhilarating—at least to this psychoanalyst. We can trace the impact of Beckett’s work with Bion on his personal and creative life, and we get an early glimpse of an analyst who would go on to become an important figure in his field, alongside Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, and Jacques Lacan.

Bion, who was born in 1897, in Muttra, India, to a European father and an Anglo-Indian mother, moved to England for boarding school at age eight. After fighting for the British in the First World War, he attended Oxford, and then University College London for medical school. By the time he entered formal analytic training, at the British Psycho-Analytical Society, around 1946, he was already recognized for the originality of his thinking, particularly his experimental work on group relations, which he began as an Army psychiatrist during the Second World War. Once, after Bion presented a paper, Klein, who had been his training analyst and saw him as a “prize catch,” “was found weeping in the hall because Bion had failed to give acknowledgement to her,” the biographer Phyllis Grosskurth notes in “Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work.”

In my own experience, I’ve found that practicing psychoanalysis in a Bionian way is like writing poetry rather than prose—intuition is as important as intellect. Whereas Freud’s investment in legitimizing psychoanalysis led him to frame it as a medical science, Bion treated it as an art form. He believed that psychoanalysts, like “artists, musicians, scientists, discoverers,” were investigating what may be “beyond our comprehension or experience” and should not limit themselves to “what we understand.” Even the notion that what happens when we are awake is more real than when we dream was, to Bion, “prejudice . . . in favour of the voluntary musculature.”

Bion’s clinical work was guided by the belief that an analyst “needs to be able to listen not only to the words, but also to the music.” In one case vignette, Bion described a breakthrough after realizing his patient was not conveying verbal meaning but was “doodling in sound.” He once advised an analyst presenting a case to tolerate confusion: the befuddling story his patient had relayed “will form the basis of an interpretation which you will give six sessions later, six months later, six years later. That is why it is so important to have your senses open to what is going on.”

Bion was fond of quoting a line from the philosopher Maurice Blanchot: “The answer is the misfortune of the question.” In analysis, Bion told an audience in 1976, “there is always a craving to slap in an answer so as to prevent any spread of the flood through the gap which exists.” Analysts must resist the urge to stop up that gap—which Bion described as the “nasty hole where one hasn’t any knowledge at all”—with ready-made answers. In my work with patients, I have observed that the unconscious, too, is a nasty hole. You can’t anticipate what will escape. That’s why I particularly appreciate Bion’s portrait of the dynamic between analyst and analysand. “In every consulting-room, there ought to be two rather frightened people: the patient and the psychoanalyst,” Bion said in an interview that same year. (His writings and interviews can be found in “The Complete Works of W. R. Bion,” edited by Chris Mawson.) “If they are not both frightened, one wonders why they are bothering to find out what everyone knows.”

Beckett, in writing to McGreevy about his sessions with Bion, described himself as unplugged: “belting along with the covey with great freedom of indecency & conviction.” (“The covey” was Beckett’s nickname for his analyst, who was nine years his senior and wore chunky knitted Scottish sweaters.) After a few weeks, Beckett’s symptoms began to resolve, and after a few months he observed that “things at home” felt “simpler.” Yet during extended stays with his mother—something Bion had advised against—his symptoms would return. He would then resume with Bion and report “feeling better,” which he thought was “a kind of confirmation of the analysis.” The sessions seemed to alleviate his writer’s block: “I have been working hard at the book”—his first published novel, “Murphy”—“& it goes very slowly, but I do not think there is any doubt now that it will be finished sooner or later,” he reported in October, 1935.

Analysis, rather than encouraging Beckett to adjust to the external world as his mother had hoped, led him inward. He experienced “extraordinary memories of being in the womb, intra-uterine memories,” as he would later tell Knowlson. The writer began to see his “diseased condition” as having begun in his “pre-history,” the time before he was born. Analysis also helped unleash the wholly original style one sees in “Murphy,” published in 1938, about a protagonist who would rather be strapped naked to a chair and “come alive in his mind” than pursue such normative aims as a job, marriage, money. Dylan Thomas, reviewing “Murphy” that year, dubbed it “Freudian blarney.” Beckett was no longer following anyone around.

On October 2, 1935, toward the end of Beckett’s analysis, Bion invited the writer to dinner—“a hurried but good sole at the Etoile in Charlotte St.,” Beckett noted to McGreevy—followed by a lecture by Carl Jung. It was a move as unorthodox then as it would be now. “I hope he hasn’t done us both a disservice by inviting me to meet him in that way,” Beckett reflected. The lecture was the third of five in a series; Bion had attended two, making it likely that he thought Jung’s insights would be meaningful to his patient.

Sure enough, something Jung said appears to have catalyzed their work together. Jung discussed how children maintain an extraordinary awareness of the world from which they have emerged until a “veil of forgetfulness is drawn” and they adapt to the external world. He spoke in elusive terms about a girl who lived between worlds. “She had never been born entirely,” Jung said.

For Beckett, this last line was a bolt from the blue. In 1968, he recounted Jung’s anecdote about the little girl to the French poet and playwright Charles Juliet, who recalled Beckett saying, “I have always had the feeling that I had never been born either.”

This idea would reverberate throughout Beckett’s work. The British actress Billie Whitelaw observes, in her 1995 memoir, that Beckett “invariably said one particular thing, usually in passing, that gave me the key to the part.” In Beckett’s 1957 radio play, “All That Fall,” Whitelaw starred as Mrs. Rooney, a character “haunted” by a line spoken at a lecture by “one of these new mind doctors” who told a story of a girl who “had never really been born!” Whitelaw remembers Beckett describing Mrs. Rooney as “ ‘bursting with abortive explosiveness.’ ” And in Beckett’s play “Footfalls,” from 1976, she reports that the playwright said of the character she played, “She was never properly born.”

But perhaps the most striking iteration of the little girl from Jung’s lecture is in Beckett’s 1972 play “Not I,” which opens with a description of a “tiny little girl” cast into the world “before her time” through a “godforsaken hole.” These words are spoken onstage by Mouth, a disembodied mouth that seems to be floating in the air, unleashing a rapid flood of free-associative speech. Mouth, who is nearing seventy, recalls moments in her life from a third-person perspective—she refers to herself as “tiny little girl” or “she,” not “I.” “I knew that woman in Ireland,” Beckett explained. “I knew who she was—not ‘she’ specifically, one single woman, but there were so many of those old crones, stumbling down the lanes, in the ditches, beside the hedgerows.” Whitelaw, on first reading the script, couldn’t stop crying. “In her outpourings I recognised my own inner scream,” she writes.

Whitelaw starred in the original London production of “Not I,” her body disappeared by a black hood, cape, eye mask, leotard, tights, and makeup. “Sam wanted all the lights taken out in the theatre, including the exits, the lavatories, and the aisles,” she observes. “There was to be no escape from the Mouth for the audience.” An impossibly tall, faintly lit “Auditor,” in a long black-hooded robe inspired by djellabas that Beckett had seen in Morocco, was positioned to the side of Mouth, listening silently, like an analyst. (The character of Auditor was cut from a 1977 television version, which zoomed in so closely on Whitelaw’s mouth that Beckett, on viewing the film, exclaimed, “My God, it looks like a giant vulva!”)

When Jessica Tandy was rehearsing the role of Mouth for its world première, at New York’s Lincoln Center, her husband, the actor Hume Cronyn, sent a cable to the playwright expressing concern that the rapidity of Mouth’s speech would make it incomprehensible. “I am not unduly concerned with intelligibility,” Beckett replied. “I hope the piece would work on the necessary emotions of the audience rather than appealing to their intellect.” In a sense, he hoped that people would listen like Bion, not just to the words but also to the music. As Whitelaw puts it, “Mouth was not going out to an audience; the audience had to be sucked into this rioting, rambling hole.”

They clamored to get in. A few nights after the production at the Royal Court Theatre London opened, Whitelaw reports, queues “went all the way round Sloane Square.” The New York production had also been a hit, leaving a “literally stunning impact upon the audience,” as Edith Oliver wrote in a review for this magazine in 1972. Beckett had seemingly unplugged the nasty hole, bringing the audience close to what Whitelaw called “some unconscious centre.” As had been the case with Beckett’s analysis, the experience appeared to be transformative. Clive Barnes, in a review in the New York Times, observed that the play “lasts about 15 minutes and a lifetime.”

Beckett’s plays are having a moment. “Krapp’s Last Tape” (1958) was staged this fall at New York University’s Skirball Center, “Endgame” recently opened at the Irish Arts Center, and “Waiting for Godot,” starring Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, is enjoying a popular run on Broadway. In each, narrative is stripped away, and the characters, unable to rely on markers of identity or a clear story, are reduced to a state of pure being. They are, in effect, brought face to face with the unconscious center—as are we.

This fall, I went to see the Skirball production of “Krapp’s Last Tape.” An isolated writer (Stephen Rea), on his sixty-ninth birthday, searches among the diary-like tapes he has recorded each year since he was in his twenties for moments that contain the “grain,” which he describes as “those things worth having when all the dust has . . . settled.” He wants to find what he calls “Box thrree, spool five,” which relays the memory of a romantic encounter forty years earlier with a woman on a boat, when his internal and external worlds were momentarily aligned. (“We lay there without moving,” the young Krapp says. “But under us all moved, and moved us.”) As it happens, Rea, who met Beckett when he starred in a London production of “Endgame” in the seventies, prerecorded himself as the younger Krapp in 2009, so that his voice quality would differ if he ever had the opportunity to play Krapp in the future. Beckett would no doubt have appreciated the layer of authenticity—during one production of “Krapp’s Last Tape,” he reportedly brought in his own slippers so that the actor playing Krapp would have the right shuffle.

“Krapp’s Last Tape” ends with the older Krapp listening again to his younger self describe the romantic scene and then sitting motionless as the “tape runs on in silence.” Something about his immobility made me want to leap out of my seat. “Nothing to be done,” the opening line of “Waiting for Godot,” is a common refrain I hear in sessions these days. But Beckett didn’t live that way. He joined the French Resistance in 1941 after the Nazis had invaded France. “You simply couldn’t stand by with your arms folded,” he explained to Knowlson.

“Somewhere in the analytic situation, buried in masses of neuroses, psychoses and so on, there is a person struggling to be born,” Bion said in a 1975 clinical seminar, clearly influenced by Jung’s lecture, too. Working with Bion helped Beckett access the courage to figure out who he was and to be that person, even if it required living between worlds. As Jung put it in his talk, “My principle is: for heaven’s sake do not be perfect, but by all means try to be complete—whatever that means.” ♦

During the twentieth century, the United States declared war on wildfires. In 1935, the chief of the U.S. Forest Service announced “an experiment on a continental scale”: every blaze was to be put out by 10 A.M. on the morning after it began. Given that fires had been burning regularly for hundreds of millions of years, this was an enormous departure from the natural order. Fire clears vegetation and delivers nutrients to soil, creating fresh cycles of growth that help ecosystems. Without it, American forests became dense, prone to megafires, and vulnerable to drought; woods encroached on prairies and wetlands. Only after decades of suppression did the government act on the wisdom of scientists, Indigenous communities, and fire practitioners who understood the benefits of fire. Starting in the sixties, a different kind of experiment began: federal agencies started setting fires intentionally and, in rare cases, allowing naturally occurring wildfires to restore landscapes.

And so, on July 4th, when lightning started a small fire along the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park, firefighters did not rush to put it out. If anything, the location of the blaze seemed ideal. Park managers had already been planning to burn ten thousand of the surrounding acres in the fall of 2027, and they knew that the fire, which was dubbed Dragon Bravo by a dispatcher, would have a difficult time spreading. To the south and west, the rim of the canyon provided a natural barrier. To the north and east, along a dirt road called the W1, workers had already cleared a buffer. Park officials approved the decision to “contain” the fire rather than extinguish it. It was now considered a managed wildfire.

To predict where Dragon Bravo might spread, park employees used a modelling tool that created probability maps from thousands of potential weather scenarios. The forecast was sunny, with light winds from the east; the fire was predicted to grow to seven hundred and fifty acres in its first week, with a low risk of hazardous behavior. The actual fire burned only fifty-eight acres by day five. Firefighters expected it to go the way of the fire’s namesake, an earlier fire named Dragon, which seasonal monsoons helped extinguish in 2022. We’ll be lucky if it hits the W1, an experienced firefighter remembered thinking.

Resources were diverted to another wildfire, in the nearby Kaibab National Forest. But then, on the afternoon of July 11th, the weather began to defy forecasts. The temperature reached ninety degrees. The relative humidity—an important indicator of the dryness of vegetation—plummeted. The wind switched direction; flames rose to the crowns of conifer trees and spewed embers. Within hours, Dragon Bravo had doubled in size. By evening, it had jumped the W1 and was encroaching on firefighters. It had morphed into what’s called a fast fire, one that grows four thousand acres or more in a single day. The 2018 Camp Fire, the 2023 Maui fire, and the 2025 Los Angeles fires were all fast fires.

The firefighters retreated about five miles southeast, where a fire station, staff housing, and the Grand Canyon Lodge on the North Rim were situated. Models had recently given the fire a 0.2-to-four-per-cent chance of reaching the lodge, but now crews began preparing to defend the structures. Fire and smoke overtook them. Propane tanks exploded. Some took cover from the heat behind vehicles; others found refuge at a nearby heliport. Chlorine gas began leaking from a sewage-treatment plant. The experienced firefighter saw the fire below the rim, moving sideways, and then shooting up the slope like a geyser. “It was almost like watching a volcano.”

An evacuation order spread across the entire North Rim. Robin Bies, a staff member at the Kaibab Lodge, some fifteen miles to the north, drove two hikers and their grandchildren to the South Rim, four hours away. At about 2 A.M., she looked back across the canyon and saw the red glow of Dragon Bravo. “It was just surreal,” she told me. The blaze ultimately covered a hundred and forty-five thousand acres in the span of three months, making it the largest American wildfire in 2025. Bies often wondered why firefighters hadn’t simply put it out to begin with.

A few weeks after Dragon Bravo was fully extinguished, I went to the North Rim in hope of understanding its impact. Driving through the Kaibab National Forest and Grand Canyon National Park, I crisscrossed the fire’s footprint for more than fifty miles. Some roads had only recently reopened. The last few miles of Arizona State Route 67, which led to the Grand Canyon Lodge, were still blockaded; the lodge had burned to a husk, and dozens of other homes and buildings were gone, too.

Once Dragon Bravo broke containment lines, firefighters tried every available tool to stop its progression: aircraft, fire engines, bulldozers, handcrews, hotshots, drones. These battles were written into the landscape. I could see that, in some places, firefighters had halted Dragon Bravo’s advance at a road. Herds of bison were grazing on grass that had sprouted in the blackened soil. In other spots, I saw that the fire had jumped a road and raced up a steep slope. Some evergreen trees were so crispy that they looked like matchsticks.

I stayed the night at the Kaibab Lodge, which had served as a federal-incident command post after the North Rim was evacuated. Bies helped provide food and accommodations for hundreds of wildland firefighters. “They became like family,” she told me. She made weekly trips into town to fetch them cigarettes. A sign was still hanging over the reception desk: “Welcome Dragon Slayers.”

I stood with one of Bies’s colleagues, Mark Harvey, the lodge’s handyman, in front of a grand stone fireplace. Snow was falling outside; now and then, he fed the fire a cured aspen log. How had their lodge survived? “Just luck,” Harvey said. “The wind changed direction.” He showed me videos of orange flames pulsing against the night sky. Not until mid-August did rain help firefighters corral Dragon Bravo, and the fire wasn’t fully contained until late September. Still, Harvey didn’t see the fire as a calamity. “It’s just a cycle of the forest,” he said. “We’ve got to burn all the old stuff out.” He was looking forward to spring, when he predicted that piney grouse would return and morel mushrooms would proliferate.

Many of my sources feared that Dragon Bravo would invite scrutiny of the very idea of managed wildfires. Arizona’s Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, called for an official investigation, arguing that “Arizonans deserve answers for how this fire was allowed to decimate the Grand Canyon National Park.” Other politicians have been voicing skepticism that any wildfires should be allowed to burn. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation policy agenda that has heavily influenced the Trump Administration, criticized the Forest Service for using “unplanned fire” for vegetation management, advocating instead for timber extraction. The Republican governor of Montana, Greg Gianforte, has demanded that the Forest Service “fully embrace an aggressive initial and extended attack strategy.” This year, Trump’s appointee to the chief of the Forest Service said in an annual letter that it was “critical that we suppress fires as swiftly as possible.”

The backlash is coming at a pivotal moment. Historically, thousands of firefighters have worked for diverse agencies within the Department of the Interior: the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service. These entities’ goals are more nuanced than fire suppression; they also value conservation and wilderness protection. But, as early as January, 2026, the Trump Administration plans to consolidate these firefighters under a new agency, the Wildland Fire Service, which will “reflect the increasing risk to people, property and infrastructure,” according to a September press release. (The Forest Service is part of the Department of Agriculture, so its eleven thousand firefighters will remain separate for now.) The Department of the Interior declined to elaborate on the new agency’s priorities.

Researchers, land managers, and firefighters warned that the federal government may be on the verge of regressing into a twentieth-century attitude about fire policy. “Once you create an agency that’s only focussed on fire, life and safety become the main focus, and any notion of fire as a multipurpose ecological tool loses its value,” a research scientist who worked with the Forest Service for decades told me. The Wildland Fire Service will have an incentive to avoid short-term risk rather than manage a wildfire for the sake of the ecosystem, she said. (Since Greece moved its wildland fire response from its forest service to its national fire agency, in the late nineties, its wildfire crisis has deepened; the country now spends four hundred million dollars on putting out fires, compared with only twenty-five million on land management and wildfire prevention, according to research from 2021.) “My biggest fear is that the people in charge of this consolidation are not the people who understand ecologically beneficial fire,” a senior firefighter told me. “It’s hero shit. ‘Get out there and put it out.’ ”

Managed wildfires have spread out of control before. In 1988, when such blazes were called “prescribed natural fires,” they contributed to the Yellowstone fires, which burned around 1.2 million acres over the course of five months. Sensationalized media accounts claimed that pristine forests and animal populations were decimated, which helped fuel a public backlash against the Park Service’s approach to managed wildfires. Yet ecologists now know that even those fires, though large and severe, were completely natural. “Everyone thought Yellowstone was destroyed,” Monica Turner, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin, told me. “It came back just wonderfully well on its own, without our intervention.”

Fire scientists believe that a patchwork of fire intensity—low in some places, high in others—increases the dynamism and resilience of a landscape. Repeated wildfires can create a mosaic of interlocking burned and unburned areas, which can curb subsequent blazes for a period afterward: flames can only go so far before they reach a place that has already recently ignited. In the past half century, dozens of managed wildfires have moved through a sixty-square-mile area in the Illilouette Creek Basin, in Yosemite National Park. The result of so much fire may seem counterintuitive. Scientists have discovered wet meadows proliferating and mature trees flourishing. Data suggests that, compared with the rest of the national park, the basin could be better prepared for future blazes and droughts that are a projected consequence of climate change.

Could Dragon Bravo similarly bolster the ecosystem of the North Rim? Fortuitously, the fire burned through preëxisting study plots maintained by the park’s ecologists. In August, an interdisciplinary team of experts including engineers, biologists, and vegetation specialists collected soil samples and looked at satellite imagery. They found that only two per cent of the soil had burned at a high severity, meaning that soil properties were largely not altered or damaged. Researchers will continue to gather data on soil, vegetation, and hydrology for years to come.

I heard differing opinions about the fire’s wider impact on vegetation. Historically, the North Rim burned in large, periodic fires; during the eighteenth century, it experienced four major regional wildfires. The last large-scale fire was in 1879, and fuel loads—measured in tons per acre—eventually climbed to dangerous levels. By some estimates, the tree density of the North Rim before Dragon Bravo was more than three hundred per cent higher than it was a century ago. “We certainly achieved those goals of reducing tons per acre,” the experienced firefighter said. “Over all, I think we had good effects in most of the areas.” But a local firefighter based in Flagstaff, who had seen maps of burn severity, said that some areas may be permanently transformed—for example, from forest to shrubland.

During my drive, the North Rim looked operatic. In a single hour, I drove under blue skies and through hailstorms. Thunder rumbled overhead. Rainbows framed my view of the Colorado River. When I stopped to walk through burned areas, along the eastern flank of Dragon Bravo, I saw mule deer run through colonies of aspen trees. Beneath majestic ponderosa pines, I dug into the blackened topsoil to find brown, untouched earth. At one point, I parked next to a patch of blackened Gambel oaks. On a rock, I saw a plaque that quoted Theodore Roosevelt: “Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it.”

Only half a per cent of unplanned ignitions are allowed to burn as managed wildfires. Many scientists worry that, at a time when they should be getting more widespread, they will only become rarer. Jennifer Balch, a geographer at the University of Colorado Boulder, has studied the dangers of fast fires and found that they’re uniquely damaging and costly to fight. Still, she argued that we need to keep finding opportunities for managed wildfires. Dragon Bravo hasn’t changed her mind.

In Balch’s view, the upsides of wildfires remain underappreciated. Her preliminary research, which is currently undergoing peer review, shows that, between 2010 and 2020, 3.1 million hectares of forest burned in what she deemed good wildfires. (Her definition: fires that have ecological benefits and match historical patterns of fires in the area.) That’s even larger than the 1.4 million hectares that were burned intentionally, in prescribed fires.

Firefighters were still struggling to understand why Dragon Bravo exploded in intensity. “We prepped that road so many times,” the experienced firefighter said of the W1. “I thought it was as secure as it could be.” Some of my sources felt that modelling tools are failing to account for new extremes. Faulty models also seemed to play a role in the Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire—the most destructive wildfire in the history of New Mexico.

The Department of the Interior has begun an official investigation. Early coverage of Dragon Bravo consistently described it as a managed wildfire that was being contained, not suppressed; Watch Duty, a nonprofit that tracks wildfires in real time, reported on July 8th that Dragon Bravo was being managed “for resource benefit objectives using a confine/contain strategy,” citing the public-affairs office of Grand Canyon National Park. But, when I contacted the same office, a spokesperson offered a different narrative, asserting that, “from the beginning, the fire was managed under a suppression strategy.” One of my sources, a wildfire expert who has written fire-management plans for the National Park Service, considered this claim “incoherent” and worried that it would be seen as an “inept coverup.” My sources who fought the fire felt that the park had not been forthcoming with information, and that, as a result, they had been vilified by the media and the public for struggling to contain Dragon Bravo. But I was surprised to learn that the experience did not lead to a crisis of faith in managed wildfires. If anything, it seemed to have strengthened firefighters’ convictions. “In my mind, I’m more aggressive,” the experienced firefighter said. “We got to burn more.” The Park’s public-affairs office did not respond to follow-up questions.

On my way back from the North Rim, as the sun was setting, I stopped in Coconino National Forest to meet the Flagstaff firefighter. In this part of the state, close to seven hundred thousand acres have burned in managed wildfires since 2010. These blazes are credited with helping undo the damage of fire suppression and returning the world’s largest continuous ponderosa-pine forest to health. The sky was turning pink; from where we stood, on the edge of a meadow, the North Rim was just a band of dark blue on the horizon. The firefighter told me that he’d been there when the Grand Canyon Lodge, a place that he loved, burned. “It was easily the most complex situation I’ve ever experienced firsthand,” he said. “Fighting fire in a nighttime environment mixed with power lines, no water, and homes burning. That is an impossible battle you can’t win.” During a crew debriefing afterward, he told me, he and many others had cried in frustration.

The firefighter pointed to a cluster of trees that had been struck by lightning in June. The surrounding area, like the North Rim, had been scheduled for several prescribed burns. He’d heard that federal officials, in Washington, had voiced a preference that the fire be suppressed quickly. Instead, a number of hotshot crews herded and cajoled and steered the fire, helping it to burn ten thousand acres in three days. Managing the fire cost around seventy dollars per acre, the firefighter estimated; a prescribed burn might have cost a thousand an acre. “We know what good land management looks like,” he told me. “We felt the pressure not to do it, and we did it anyway.” Then he paused, took in the scene before us, and added, “I just love this fire.” ♦

“Train Dreams” is a beautiful movie, but I can’t say that I entirely trust its beauty. The director, Clint Bentley, and the cinematographer, Adolpho Veloso, have composed a studiedly rapturous hymn to the American wilderness—to the scenic glories of babbling brooks, wispy cloud formations, and trees soaring majestically heavenward. It’s an exaltation of the natural world, rendered with an almost supernatural intensity of light and color, and with a score, by Bryce Dessner, whose rippling chords seem to evoke the sounds of cascading water. Watching the movie earlier this year, via the Sundance Film Festival’s online-viewing platform, I marvelled at the clarity of Veloso’s images, with their sharp interplay of sunshine and shadows: a patch of emerald-green forest, glimpsed from inside a cavernous tunnel, didn’t lose its contrasts on my home TV. A second viewing, this time in a proper theatre, proved more captivating still: here, at last, was a screen capacious enough to withstand the radiance of a golden-pink sunset and the faces of Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones. This is craftsmanship of an undeniably majestic order, and it has a way of both dropping your jaw and raising an eyebrow; you begin to wonder, at a certain point, if the film’s visual splendor has begun to outstrip its meaning. How exquisite is too exquisite?

If that seems an ungenerous response, it arises, I think, from the comparatively thorny, tough-minded spirit of the film’s source material: a 2011 novella of the same name, by Denis Johnson, who held the world’s beauty and its ugliness in more persuasive balance. The movie, like the novella, consists of moments from the life of Robert Grainier (Edgerton), a thoughtful, taciturn soul. He is orphaned as a young boy, sometime in the late nineteenth century, and spends much of his life in and around Bonners Ferry, Idaho; he dies, in 1968, in equally profound solitude. The eighty-odd years in between, though, are not untouched by love and companionship. Grainier falls for Gladys Olding (Jones), a churchgoing woman, as sparky and forthright as he is quiet and withdrawn. They marry, build a riverside cabin, and are soon raising an adorable baby daughter, Katie. But Grainier is a timberman, and his work forces him to leave his family for long stretches at a time. Sometimes he heads west, toward the Pacific; once, he ventures as far east as Montana. Where there are trees to be felled, lumber to be moved, and bridges and train tracks to be built, Grainier is there.

We learn much of this from an unseen narrator (voiced, superbly, by Will Patton), who maintains the same wry, semidetached tone whether he’s describing the odd comedy of Grainier’s life—or, in time, its defining tragedy. The narrator speaks bluntly but tenderly of Grainier’s irreducible ordinariness: he is one of countless men who, with no better prospects or singular passions to speak of, leave homes and families to undertake work of great danger, meagre pay, and, in the long run, monumental significance. The razing of forests and the construction of railroads—the unceasing industrialization of America, stretching across two world wars and touching the dawn of the space age—will reshape the very landscape of the country. But what mark will the individual laborers themselves leave? Not much, the film suggests. No wonder that when some of them die on the job, their boots are nailed into the trunks of trees, as a solemn act of remembrance: these men existed.

For Grainier, though, an unmourned death leaves an even deeper impression. One summer day in 1917, he tries to intervene—but ultimately can only watch, in helpless horror—when three white men rough up a Chinese railroad worker, Fu Sheng (Alfred Hsing) and hurl him off a trestle bridge, to his death. No reason for the killing is given, and the sheer inhuman senselessness of it won’t leave Grainier alone. For years afterward, he will be haunted by Fu’s reproachful ghost, silently castigating him for not doing more. On first viewing, something about the film’s treatment of Fu nagged at me, for reasons that I understood only after I read the novella, which takes a rather more complicated and, I think, more honest view of the circumstances. In Johnson’s original version, “the Chinaman,” as he’s called, stands accused of theft, and he ultimately escapes his captors. More pointedly, Johnson’s Grainier, far from being either an innocent bystander or a well-meaning protester, actively participates in the attempted execution. In the film, he defends Fu, asking, “What’s he done?” In the novella, he seizes the accused by the legs and cries out, “I’ve got the bastard, and I’m your man!”

Being something of an anti-originalist when it comes to adaptations, I wouldn’t suggest that Bentley and his co-screenwriter, Greg Kwedar, owe their source any strict fidelity. (The two men are frequent collaborators; they also wrote “Sing Sing,” which Kwedar directed, and “Jockey,” directed by Bentley.) Nonetheless, every change inevitably reveals something of the adapter’s intent, and what this particular departure betrays, I think, is a curious lack of faith in the audience—as if we could only sympathize with a morally unblemished protagonist, even one already imbued with Edgerton’s ineffable salt-of-the-earthiness and melancholy gravitas. As for Fu, he is little more than a pawn, a victim, and a spectral guilt trip; he dies and then returns, with no voice of his own, for the sake of Robert’s spiritual betterment. No one would expect this movie to encompass, or center, the history of indignities and sufferings endured by the Chinese laborers who helped build this country. But the filmmakers’ highly selective sampling of that history raises questions that “Train Dreams,” possessed of a kind of tunnel vision by design, has neither the ability nor the inclination to answer.

In a recent essay for Vulture, the critic Roxana Hadadi laid out a compelling argument in favor of Bentley and Kwedar’s liberties in adaptation, noting that they subtly transformed the film into a story “about the corrosive impact of passivity and inertia.” Passivity is certainly one of Grainier’s defining traits; resignation is another, and it is arguably what costs him a happy future with his family. When Gladys proposes that she and Katie accompany him on his work trips, he shoots down the suggestion, claiming that it’s too dangerous for them—an idea that will seem all the more bitterly ironic, in light of the dangers that, as we shall see, can surface at home.

For much of the film, though, Grainier is a quiet observer of other people’s tragedies. An early scene revisits a key memory from childhood, when more than a hundred Chinese families are deported from his town. Patton’s narrator tells us that “Grainier was baffled by the casualness of the violence.” Some time later, the young Grainier stumbles upon, and tentatively assists, an unnamed, gravely wounded man (Clifton Collins, Jr.) lying in the woods—an unpleasant incident, the narrator tells us, that he will push away from his mind in the years to come. In this instance, though, the film effectively uses Grainier’s psychology as cover for its own squeamishness. In the novella, the injured man confesses to raping and impregnating a twelve-year-old girl—a detail that has been airbrushed away here, in another morally sanitizing touch.

“Train Dreams” is thus something of a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of caution—and a movie that is ultimately tripped up by its own circumspection. But even its lapses and dodges have the effect of only strengthening my admiration for Edgerton, whose grizzled magnetism has seldom been more affecting. In scene after scene, Grainier plays the hushed foil to a more demonstrative scene partner, and in each instance he finds the drama in a stricken gaze, a wan smile, and, infrequently, a release of pent-up emotion. He forges perhaps his most meaningful friendship—and his most striking personality contrast—with Arn Peeples (William H. Macy), a dynamite expert who is, fittingly, an explosion of colorful chitchat. Peeples is one of the film’s designated folksy voices of conscience; around a campfire one night, he urges his fellow-lumbermen to consider the environmental implications of chopping down five-hundred-year-old trees en masse. “This world is intricately stitched together, boys,” he says. “Every thread we pull, we know not how it affects the design of things.”

Several years later, after leaving the logging business and settling down in his Idaho cabin for good, Grainier will cross paths with a U.S. Forest Service worker, Claire Thompson (a warm Kerry Condon), who is brought in to survey the region after a devastating wildfire. A fount of woodland wisdom, Thompson articulates her own version of Peeples’s sentiment: “In the forest, every least thing’s important,” she says. “It’s all threaded together, so you can’t tell where one thing ends and another begins.” These are stirring and inarguable sentiments, and they underscore that Bentley is working firmly under the spell of Terrence Malick, American cinema’s great extoller of the spiritual and material interconnectedness of all living things. The Malickian inflections are especially pronounced when we see Grainier at home with his family, holding his baby girl beside a river, or watching her interact with a flock of chickens. When a much older Grainier rides the Great Northern Railway to Spokane, Washington, he looks confounded by his encounter with paved streets and tall buildings—a sequence that reminded me of the views of downtown Houston in Malick’s “The Tree of Life” (2011), which convey a similar sense of alienation from urban civilization.

The glory of Malick’s cinema lies in its poetic expansiveness, its vast and seemingly boundless associative power. It’s no huge knock on “Train Dreams” to say that it feels like a compacted, simplified version of the real deal, or that it feels sturdily prosaic by comparison. The problem lies in the specific quality of the prose, which, for all its meticulous restraint, is also at unnecessary pains to spell out every last meaning. That’s especially true in a closing montage that juxtaposes moments from Grainier’s life with shots of him soaring over the landscape in a biplane, in a rare experience of a modern world that has long since passed him by. It’s a predigested catharsis, less revelatory than summative in its effect, and it suggests—much as the prison drama “Sing Sing” suggested, with its dramatically expedient view of life and art behind bars—that Bentley and Kwedar have, fundamentally, a carpenter’s approach to cinema. They offer the promise and pleasure of handcrafted art, but with every rough edge sanded down, every surface given a soulful coat of varnish. “Beautiful, ain’t it? Just beautiful,” Grainier murmurs toward the heavens. Yes, but only just. ♦